Persons celebrating an Anniversary in December 2005

A new chess book for children, written by our member Rubens Filguth (Brazil).

Dale A. Brandreth is the first of three US-American members we will meet this month – Dale celebrated his "74th" on December 17th. We have already exhaustively told about him last year, so we will merely add now that he has recently enlarged his series of chess publications by a new tournament book: the work on Ostende 1906 written by our member Tony Gillam was published by Caissa Editions and waits for finding its way into the collectors’ shelves.

It is already two years since our last appreciation of the Dutch study phenomenon Harold van der Heijden, owing to his 45th birthday (on December 18th) it’s his turn again to get an "honourable mention". Naturally we cannot do on this occasion without pointing to the update of his Endgame Study Database (III) which came out this year, his collection on CD now includes nearly 67,700 studies and can only be ordered from Harold himself, for this please visit his website as well as – via the link there – the site of Tim Krabbé who gives a short review and lets us know that in the last years Harold has developed more and more into a remarkable and successful study composer – the number of his award-winning works is steadily increasing! [For subscribers of the German online periodical Computerschach und Spiele I additionally refer to the article by Helmut Conrady, All together: Endgame Study Database 2005, issue 03+04/2005.]

On Christmas Day chess friend and collector Jürgen Wolf has completed 45 years as well; as we announced two years ago his intercontinental move from California to Europe was yet to come – meanwhile he has indeed found his new home in the Eastern Tyrol town of Riegersdorf thus constituting just "1/3" of our Austrian KWA members.

The (US-)American doyen of our association is known to be Kurt Landsberger, he looked back on whole 85 years on December 28th. This year’s October the irrepressible Steinitz biographer managed to travel to Düsseldorf again not only to visit the fair but also our chairman Michael Negele in Wuppertal. This meeting had an absolutely catalytic effect on the completion of Kurt Landsberger’s new article whose publication we may expect soon in V. Fiala’s Quarterly for Chess History: of course he has stuck to "his" Steinitz, this time it’s about his relationship and his correspondence with von der Lasa in the 1870ies.

Kurt Landsberger at Steinitz's grave.

We are very delighted about Kurt’s undiminished activity and we wish him many more healthy years with his family and his chess friends!

At New Year’s Eve we are looking towards Florida where the currently third 45th birthday of this month must be dealt with – Todd A. Chavez is the recipient of our greetings. Our new member is a librarian and Director for Technology & Technical Services (i.e. systems/networks and cataloging) with special skills in bibliometric analysis; additionally he has taught the subject "websites – creation and management" on university level. We will close giving pleasant prospects for the new year for all of us: a bibliography of chess literature (in English; 1989 to present) written by Todd Chavez will soon be published by McFarland! We are really looking forward to that ...